Okay computer geniuses

[catmandu57]

I'm thinking of trying something on my own. I removed the harddrive from my old computer and I'm thinking of putting it in this one. The physical part is no problem, it's the afterwards I'm not sure of.

I need to make the old drive the slave and I don't know how to do that...yet, and I don't know what's going to happen the first time I boot up, or how to access the files on the old drive,

Is this maddness on my part or what? Can this be done? Maybe I should just go buy a new drive with lots and lots of gb's and install that instead. Someone stop me before I screw up.

[Davis_X_Machina]

1. Somewhere on the drive...

there's usually a pinblock like this:

:::: and you use a jumper to connect two of them, for example

:{:}::

Look for the letters MS, and SL over the pinblock, or a diagram on the drive's label.

[BlueEyedSon]

5. Right.

and if im not mistaken, you should not need to change the jumpers on the existing drive.....

[demnan]

2. Do you need the hard disk space?

Other than copying your files from one computer to another you didn't really say why you wanted to do this.

On edit:
The usual reason to do something like this is to allow yourself a dual booting computer so you don't have two operating systems on the same hard drive. Other than that, I'd burn CDs of the files and just transfer them over.

[BlueEyedSon]

3. New drives are pretty cheap, is that a relatively recent drive

i.e. is it big enough to no go spend the 100 bucks?

[trotsky]

4. This is not all that hard.

It's generally one of the better ways to make sure you've got all your data off your old drive.

It involves setting jumpers (tiny little connectors) on one or both drives, depending on a number of factors.

Check the new drive in the system. You should see a sticker explaining where to position the jumper to make it a Master, Slave, or Cable-Select. You should see something similar on your old drive.

So if the first drive is set to Master, put your old drive on Slave, and hook them up together on the same cable.

If the first one is on Cable-Select, you should see that the gray ribbon cable is marked "Master" where it is plugged in. Put your old drive on Cable-Select, and connect it to the "Slave" plug.

Then just boot up. PCs will always look to the Master drive on the Primary IDE interface as the boot drive, unless the BIOS allows you to change it (not often). Your old drive will appear in Explorer as "D:", most likely.

[Flightful]

6. It's pretty easy

On the drive label there should be something to tell you how to position the jumper to the slave position, but you may want to consider leaving it as master and putting it onto the secondary controller. Just make sure that if the CD is also on the secondary then it should be set to slave mode. The main advantage of doing this is you get better performance when moving files between the two drives because they aren't sharing the controller.

[zulchzulu]

7. Assuming you're running Windows

Put the drive in the new computer; you'll probably need to reinstall the operating system to match the drivers for your machine's video card and whatever other peripherals you have.

The best bet FIRST is to back up everything you need on the computer the drive is in now.

Then take the hard drive out and put it in the other computer and install a fresh operating system on that drive.

See if that works. The key thing FIRST is to back everything up on the drive before you exchange the drive.

[tridim]

8. If your OS is on the old drive

You'll need to keep it as is. Make your new drive the slave by setting the jumper, throw it in your case and enjoy. Everything is pretty much automatic.

If you want to reinstall the OS, just put in the new drive, set as master, format it and install. You should probably partition it (done during install), give the OS a 20gig partition and use the rest for data.

[catmandu57]

9. Okay I'll try it

the main reason I want to do this is the files left on the old drive. Looking at the drive I removed on the lable it says jumper/j50, master/single, under that on. Then, slave/off.
I'll insert it and see what happens.